The Wild Wild Wild West of School Lunches #2: Where's the Beef?

Every morning on my scenic winding drives along the back ways and byways of Klickitat County, Washington, I pass cows. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They come in traditional cow colors. Some are black and white. Some are reddish and white. Some are all black. Some are all red.  Like men's shirts which only come in solid, stripes, and plaid, cow attire lacks imagination. Nevertheless they provide a bucolic ambiance. Occasionally I see a real Texas longhorn.
Each spring and fall I can count on being late to work or home or somewhere because I get stuck behind a cattle drive. Real cowboys and real cowgirls on horses and four wheelers with the standard issue cattle dogs drive them from pastures in the Simcoe mountains to their lower winter pastures in the fall and then back to the mountains in the spring. It would be like a movie except I live here.
The cows graze on grass and just about anything edible which gets in their way. That's what they do. They eat. It is not easy being a large vegetarian. It takes a lot of grass. Did I say GRASS? Yes, when left to their own devices,cows will eat grass.
Cows who spend their days in stockyards and slaughter yards eat corn and grain. To the uninitiated this seems like no big deal. I like corn. Corn is good for me. And indeed organic corn is good for you and other omnivores and herbivores. Deer who are browsers love  corn. Turkeys love corn. Corn is one of the three sisters of Turtle Island. Corn, beans and squash (the three sisters) not only grow together quite well but they make a perfect meal.
But corn doesn't love cows. Because cows are grazers, not browsers, a diet of corn and grain begins to rot their systems almost immediately. Their stomachs change from a beneficial neutral environment to an acidic environment. What this means for us non scientists is that they begin rotting from the inside as soon as they switch from eating grass to eating corn. This is why over 50% of the antibiotics used in America are used in stockyards.To combat the liver disease and myriad diseases associated with stockyards cows are fed large doses of antibiotics, steroid and other growth chemicals.

This is what we are feeding our kids every day in lunch rooms all across Turtle Island.

Real Beef is good for you. Real beef is full of beneficial Omega 3 fatty acids. Omega 3 is something we need to function. It prevents everything from high blood pressure to attention deficit disorder. Grass fed beef is actually as lean as venison or elk.A grass fed 6 ounce steak will have 100 less calories than  a 6 ounce grain fed steak.
So naturally I have some questions?

1. When there are cows a few miles from my schools why does their beef come from a stockyard in Chicago?
2. Why are we poisoning our kids with toxic corn fed beef if we love them so much?
3. How are kids who don't get the Omega 3 fatty acids they so vitally need for brain function supposed to perform on all those tests we give them?

I will just keep asking questions until I get answers that lead to changes. Hopefully you will too.http://www.americangrassfedbeef.com/grass-fed-natural-beef.asp